Last week the News/Media Alliance applauded The New York Times for filing its lawsuit asserting that Microsoft and OpenAI have violated the law by taking millions of the Times’s copyrighted works to use in their products.
Alliance President and CEO Danielle Coffey stated: “The New York Times’s complaint demonstrates the value of quality journalism to AI developers. These companies repurpose and monetize news content, competing with the very industry they are benefiting from. Quality journalism and GenAI can complement each other if approached collaboratively, but using journalism without permission or payment is unlawful, and certainly not fair use.”
In a White Paper released in October, an analysis commissioned by the Alliance found that there is heavy reliance on journalistic and creative content by AI training models along with verbatim text from articles found in AI outputs. The findings support a legal claim, parallel to the same findings asserted in The New York Times’s complaint.
Coffey continued: “The value of quality journalism has been debated for years. We are at a point where the question is not whether quality journalism should be compensated, rather a question of how much. In the case of AI, copyright protected content used without authorization should be a priority in releasing these technologies to the public so that responsible innovation can live alongside responsible reporting.”
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